Just a thought - as well as the official MVC / ERS responses to this consultation, or perhaps to feed into these, we (the readers of this blog) could draft our own response using http://www.wikispaces.com/ or some such.

Or perhaps a draft submission on the site that people could personalise and submit? - to keep those civil servants busy.

I'm off on holiday for a week now, but happy to chip in with some draft/starter text when I get back. If anyone else if game?

Lord Strahclyde in The Guardian doesn't want PR for Lords elections.

Nothing whatever to do with the Lords, but to spread a little wider the thoughts in my comment on Jonathan Freedland's article in today's Guardian.

***1 -. "They could have considered Margaret Thatcher, who survived the recession of 1981 to win in 1983.)"

2 - ."Downing Street recognises that it has made some terrible mistakes, none greater than the 10p tax issue,"

3 -. "It will not be a referendum but a choice: Labour or Conservative."

1. Thatcher did not on any rational assessment "win" the 1983 election . Under our grossly unrepresentative electoral system she did indeed receive an overall majoity of 144 seats.But this was a phoney majority mainly due to the fact that the LibSDP got a mere 23 seats. They would, under any rational system, have received around 160 seats to reflect the fact that they got more than a quarter of all votes cast.

2. There is one supreme "mistake" (betrayal would be a better word) for which Labour are now paying the price: the cynical abandonment of their unequivocal 1997 manifesto commitments to changing the electoral system, following the realisation of the malign effects the system had had in giving us two decades of quite outstandingly destructive Thatcherite elective dictatorships

3. It really is remarkable how journalists like Jonathan Freedland apparentl;y cannot imagine, much less suggest or recommend, any other system but our worn-out utterly disastrous TweedleDee TweedleDum swop at irregular intervals.

Freedland mentions that the Tories are 20 points ahead in the latest opinion polls. In fact the latest ICM poll shows the Tories and the main left-of-centre (Labour plus LibDems) both on exactly the same figure: 45%. And if we take into account some of the 10% "Other", the left-of-centre has - as always - a majority which is never never represented.

Why cannot Freedland be castigating the government for, by reneging on their PR promises, so cynically betraying those who voted for Labour in 1997,? He might even be suggesting that there could be a way of at least representing the true WEIGHT of left-of-centre opinion: introduce AV (STV in single-member consituencies) before the next election, as an interim measure, with the ultimate aim of introducing the proportional STV in multi-member constituencies (as in Northern Ireland) . Owing to the need for boundary changes there would not be time before the next election at last to honour in spirit their 1997 PR commitments by introducing STV .****

I agree. I like the AV for Commons; STV for 2nd chamber approach- and STV for local government. We won't get it until we get a hung Parliament though.